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Thereβs a longstanding debate over the intellectual capabilities of Homo erectus, but a new review article looks at the available evidence on brain size, vocal anatomy, genetics / population genetics, and archaeology to conclude that they did have a form of language.
mindmatters.ai/2026/02/pape...
Did Homo erectus have language? A new review article says yes
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Grab a copy here:
Amazon: amzn.to/4s0YEpL
Bookshop: bookshop.org/a/110785/978...
First published in 1935 and regularly updated and republished in new editions ever since, βA history of the English languageβ has been the authoritative textbook on the history of English for nearly a century. And now the 7th edition has just been released!
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Where does slang come from? How does it spread throughout society? And why do people use it?
Psychology Today interviewed me, Adam Aleskic ( @etymologynerd.bsky.social), and Valerie Fridland about exactly these questions. Hereβs what we had to say:
www.psychologytoday.com/ca/articles/...
π° Hereβs what happened this week in language and linguistics!
Website: linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/2026-09/
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π§ How your brain separates sounds into words
π§πΌ How toddlers in Finland are saving an endangered Saami language
π£οΈ Language learning can help lower your risk of dementia by 40%
π΅ Is βcostedβ the past tense of βcostβ?
π How printing presses ignited the first information revolution
If you want more of the latest news, research, and interesting articles in language and linguistics, check out my free weekly digest!
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Why the worst idea in linguistics wonβt die: Why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong (mostly)
open.substack.com/pub/colingor...
Youβve just participated in one of the most famous linguistics experiments of all timeβThe Wug Test.
Find out what the Wug Test tells us about how language works in this free issue of the newsletter!
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π€ This is a wug.
π€π€ Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two _____.
a) /wΚΙ‘/
b) /wΚΙ‘s/
c) /wΚΙ‘z/
d) /wΚΙ‘Ιͺz/
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The use of βcostβ vs. βcostedβ as the past tense of βcostβ over time in the Google Books corpus
If this continues, eventually βcostβ will become a regular past tense verb.
Which do you say?
- It cost $12.
- It costed $12.
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While bees obviously canβt use this skill with human-level complexity, any level of recognition does provide compelling evidence that bees can differentiate between short and long time durations.
www.popularmechanics.com/science/anim...
Since decoding the βwaggle danceβ in the 1940s, bees have been at the forefront of research into insect intellect ππ§
A new study shows that bees can be trained to understand the dot-dash behavior of morse code when those short dots and long dashes are associated with sugary rewards.
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Recent work at Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative, focused on studying communication in whales, dolphins, and porpoises) shows that sperm whale calls feature vowel-like sounds that resemble elements of human speech.
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Read more at Scientific American:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/dogs...
This parallels how human infants extend meanings to new words as well. At first, babies rely on how things look to understand words, but by age 14 months they can also use the role or function of an object to understand them.
The seven dogs that had completed all experimental phases chose the right toy about two-thirds of the timeβwell about the 12.5 percent expected for selections by chance.
After four weeks of training, the researchers introduced brand new toys with a variety of designs. This time the dogs only used the toy, but were not taught words for any of them. After a week of playing with the new toys, the owners then asked the dogs to retrieve either a βpullβ or a βthrowβ.
A new study had owners of 10 talented dogsβmostly border colliesβteach them words for objects in two categories: tug toys, called βpullsβ, and fetch toys, called βthrowsβ. All toys were different in size, shape, and color, so appearance could not guide learning.
Some dogs can learn categories like human toddlers do
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